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Moz provides a list of recommended agencies to work with.
http://moz.com/community/recommended
The list isn't updated often, so if you've already considered those and need more direction I can be emailed through Moz's PM system and/or contacted through the website in my profile.
The best way is to provide high quality, value-added content without spamming keyword rich anchors back to your blog. Guest posting, when done properly, can still be an effective link building strategy if it doesn't minimize the content.
For example, find a highly related niche website and write up an insightful, lengthy article (none of that 300 word crap). In that article, touch briefly on a related topic that you've expanded upon in detail on your own website - like an aside note where a reader can visit to gain deep understanding on a supplemental topic. If both articles (the guest post and your own article) are unique and high quality, the contextual link should be a positive addition to your link portfolio.
You want it to be seen as natural and appropriate - not spammy and an obvious tactic at only receiving a link. Keep the readers' best interest in mind and you should be ok, as long as the quality of the website you're guest blogging on also executes legitimate link building strategies.
What topics are you intending to write about?
Hi Paul - You're correct from the start, you want to 301 those dead pages to their closest related page. Maybe the sports team or sport category. From what you've written, I'm sure you can figure this one out - nice job!
Hi Jess,
I suggest considering the following for your page:
Add in an h1 tag - currently, it is missing from the page and it is an important on-page ranking factor
Add a transcript of the video
This can add a lot of content and structure to the page (more headings). It also improves usability, there are many people out there that prefer to read through a transcript rather than sit through a video.
Wrap your video and its pertinent details in the proper Schema data
Create a video sitemap
These should help you increase the ranks and fill out those video pages.
I believe it is because Sephora is using a recommended 3rd party product review aggregator, Bazaarvoice.
They most likely share their product reviews with Google through a data feed file and Google understands enough to implement the reviews in the Organic search. I've only seen reviews shared this way for the purpose of includes reviews in Google Shopping (previously, PLAs), but not organic search.
If youre going to be updating your URLs for best-practices, I would incorporate the conversion to https as well - do it all in one shot, as you've said.
Just ensure you're implementing 301 redirects properly. Not doing so can have disastrous results.
It looks like the 301s were meant to force a trailing slash at the end of the URL. This would be done to prevent duplicate URLs. However, rather than add each URL manually, you could replace it with a regex
Example:
<code>RewriteRule ^(.*)([^/])$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1$2/ [L,R=301]</code>
FWIW, I think you executed appropriately. I would have redirected 1 -> 3 and 2 -> 3 just as you did. It is going to take a while for the authority to catch up to the new (#3) domain and I would expect a lot of that authority coming from 2 -> 3 since 1 -> 2 has had a lot of time for its authority to pass to the #2 domain.
Are you only looking to have the person's job title available via snippet? I hope you're not looking to have the person's photo show up in the SERPs, I believe that is still a discontinued feature.
The People icrodata you've implemented appears to be correct. You could try going with microformats instead of microdata and see if that helps, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146897\. Google's example used microformats, so maybe they favor that schema.
However, I'm more inclined that they've deemed the page quality too low and not doing much to update the SERP. I would try adding content to the agent's page, maybe highlight content pieces they are proud off, skills they possess, previous travels they have put together, locations they specialize in, testimonials from customers of the agent, and anything creative you can think of - then see if that helps it get updated in the SERPs.